To Violate the Oblivious, Xasthur’s album from 2004, is a strong symbol of isolation in sound form. It is not ordinary music, but rather an acoustic veil between wakefulness and a twilight state – it is oppressive, enraptured and disturbing. Malefic, the artist behind the project, creates an environment where time stands still and pain flows into dense, discordant tones. The lo-fi production, often misunderstood as a defect, functions here like an aesthetic filter – it only lets through pure mood. Each track seems to have been created in complete darkness, as if the instruments had not been played but conjured up.
The album rises up between feverish guitars, enraptured keyboard sounds and barely human-sounding screams like a black obelisk in black metal. Tracks like “Screaming at Forgotten Fears” or “A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors” elude any clear structure and offer no relief – they leave the listener in a state somewhere between trance and trauma.
The track “Walker of Dissonant Worlds” is particularly important, not only musically, but also because of the accompanying video – the only one in which Malefic himself ever took part. On YouTube, this video resembles a hidden object: grainy, disturbing, timeless. It shows no action or faces – just flickering shadows, shots of nature and decaying places, embedded in visual distortions that seem like sound itself: fragile, ghostly and deeply uncanny. Malefic appears here not as a person, but as an absence, a shadow of his own music. The video is a fragment, a lost glimpse into a universe that eludes any clear perception. “Walker of Dissonant Worlds” thus becomes the key to the entire album: a restless walk through strange, discordant planes – worlds in which you cannot get lost because you have long since been lost.
To Violate the Oblivious remains a manifesto of retreat, proof that music needs no words, presence or stage – only honesty, pain and the willingness to meet each other in the void. It is a work that not only accompanies you, but haunts you. Once you have ventured into this dark world of sound, you will not leave it again so quickly – even if you wanted to.